TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors | Hacker News Reader

TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors

wsj.com

54 pointsbase2john21 comments

This is a headline straight out of 2005 (or 1995): “The World Wide Web is Serving Up Sex and Drug Pictures to Minors”. Very much a moral panic headline.

I wonder what material impact seeing a video of boobs or people doing drugs actually has on minors. Like are they supposedly thinking, “I am going to go have unsafe sex now because I saw people do it on TikTok”?

Social media is so ephemeral and detached from the actual physical acts depicted in it that I don’t see how seeing “immoral” posts would materially affect a child’s behavior. If your kid is receiving and retaining subliminal moral instruction from browsing social media it means they are not getting it from elsewhere.

Tobacco companies deployed agressive product placement in Hollywood to make cigarettes cool. Because they knew that people are more likely to engage in behaviour that is seen as cool. While there isn't corporate action pushing drug use, its depiction in popular culture does have the same effect.

This is obviously an anti-China propaganda piece. It's not that Xi is throwing TikTok-preloaded Xiaomis onto Amish villages from the sky. That "WAP" song was THE mainstream last year, and it's widely known that Snapchat, for example, shows ads/stories that are way beyond what would be considered normal to show to kids.

https://archive.is/N1nJn

I’ve been looking at porn since I was 11. I feel hypersexualized but there was no stopping me from going on Bangbros lol. Kids are going to expose themselves to this material out of curiosity and hormones.

In our family, we've given our kids dumbphones and (I kid you not) pagers. They can play with their friends' phones, but that's obviously pretty limited. And thanks to Covid, we've been much better about getting the kids to keep to themselves and focus on classes. They're 11 and 9, so we'll see how it goes when they get older.

The CCP found an effective way to manipulate an entire generation.

I still don't understand how most people on HN don't realize TikTok is a tool of the CCP to manipulate the West.

Serious questions: how is it manipulating people? To what end? Is there any proof of this?

I don't doubt the government could get them to do what they want. But what would it manifest as?

> TikTok is a tool of the CCP to manipulate the West.

If you're going to say such claims they must be substantiated with strong evidence. Do you have such evidence to substantiate this? 'Search it up' isn't evidence.

>https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/politics/tik-tok-black-lives-...

This was the easiest to find although I support the cause. The point is that cause is somehow divisive in the USA and promotes discord and in-fighting, which is objectively in the interest of the CCP.

The CCP is not mentioned once in the article, nor are its supposed plans for TikTok, nor are any attempts by TikTok to stoke political division. In fact, TikTok briefly (supposedly by accident) hid posts related to Black Lives Matter.

Presenting examples of social turmoil being shown on TikTok does not prove that TikTok was created to cause turmoil. Another explanation is that people simply post about social turmoil on social media, and one popular social media platform is TikTok.

Twitter had all of the same content about protests, etc. Does that mean Twitter is controlled by the CCP?

AHAHA bro. No offense, but you're just like a parrot, chirping off the same tired talking points that other misinformed people have said. You haven't added anything of value to the discussion at all, you've just increased the amount of lies and mistruths in the world.

If you really want to make that BOLD claim, you must provide actual proper evidence.

What evidence supports the claim that the CCP is using TikTok to control the morals of U.S. children? The CCP must also want to corrupt their own children as well because a version of TikTok is widely available in China.

I am interested to learn more about the Communist Party’s initiative to get American children to see more videos of boobs and weed. Don’t you see how ridiculous this sounds?

How is the content of TikTok fundamentally different from that of any other social media in the U.S. or China? Or old-school online forums or imageboards?

Or is it more likely that TikTok is just doing the same stuff that Twitter, Vine, Facebook, etc. did, but now you think it is a diabolical conspiracy because the company is owned by a Chinese tech company rather than an American one?

Yah, because it's cool.

paywall

who cares? that's internet. they will find porn and violent videos sooner or later.

It's up to parents and culture and individuals. No state solution can meet the parameters of privacy and do anything impactful with regards to content filtering, and we should be fed up with "but think of the children" as a prelude to further losses of civil liberty.

And there really isn't any effective ways to stop them from finding this type of content. And I don't really trust any automated moderation methods either...

Only realistic option is curated content, but by whom and with what political agenda?

And what is the point, they can find it outside anyway, as there is no real way to lock down everything.

No child is going to be mentally scarred for seeing softcore porn or someone doing a bong rip. I don’t think there is anything that bad on TikTok that a teenager cannot handle it.

It says in the article that parents have to approve accounts for children under 18 anyways. If you let your kid on the internet without supervision they are probably going to see the worst things imaginable, thats the price of unfettered communication. Don’t let your kid on TikTok if you want to shelter them.

It's not just TikTok, Youtube also has similar problems:

- The disturbing YouTube videos that are tricking children: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39381889

- YouTube is reportedly pointing kids to thousands of disturbing, violent, and inappropriate videos: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/youtube-is-reportedly-po...

- On YouTube, a network of paedophiles is hiding in plain sight: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-pedophile-videos-adv...

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